A List
10/4/04

ST. LAWRENCE HOSTS NIGERIAN PLAYWRIGHT FOR LECTURE

CANTON – Award-winning Nigerian playwright Tess Onwueme will deliver the 
C.L.R. James Lecture at St. Lawrence University on Thursday, October 21, at 
4:30 p.m. in the auditorium of Hepburn Hall. The title of her talk, which is 
open to the public free of charge, is "When Life Attacks…"
	Onwueme is one of Africa's leading writers, and has received 
international recognition for many of her plays. Originally from Ogwashu-Uku, 
Delta State, Nigeria, she earned the Ph.D. in drama from the University of 
Benin, Nigeria, as well as a Master of Arts degree in literature from the 
University of Ife, Nigeria. 
      Before joining the faculty at the University of Wisconsin/Eau Claire 
in 1994 as the institution's first Distinguished Professor of Cultural 
Diversity, she was a professor of Multicultural Studies at Montclair State 
University in New Jersey, and a professor of African Studies at Vassar College. 
Onwueme's teaching, academic focus and interests include African, diasporan, 
cultural, postcolonial and women's studies, with an emphasis on the experience 
and conditions of rural women in the postcolonial, globalized Third World.
      Among the prestigious awards she has received for her writing are the 
Association of Nigerian Authors Literary Prize for Drama (respectively in 1985 
and 1995 for The Desert Encroaches, and Tell it to Women), the (African) 
Distinguished Author Award (1988), and the Martin Luther King/Ceasar 
Chavez/Rosa Parks Distinguished Writer/Scholar Award (1989/90). For two 
consecutive years (2000 and 2001), Onwueme received substantial awards from 
the Ford Foundation for her research project, "Who Can Silence the Drums: 
Delta Women Speak," resulting in the writing and production of her play, 
Then She Said It! Onwueme's play, The Missing Face, was performed off-Broadway 
in New York in 2001. 

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